If you’re in the ecommerce business and you don’t have a well-stocked, lively Pinterest page, you’re literally losing sales. Kevin Roose argues in this post on NY Mag that Pinterest is a bigger deal than we imagine for the commercial world. This is because Pinterest is designed to encourage spending in an user base already eager and able to spend.Continue reading

For years, Facebook has been the top dog of social networking. Fans could find and “Like” their favorite brands. And brands could easily connect and share content with their fans. But recent changes at Facebook, shifts in consumer behavior, and two new reports from Forrester Research and L2 have many small business owners wondering if it’s time to make the jump to Instagram.Continue reading

Instagram is a visual social platform (with over 150 million active users), where users capture, customize, and share photos and videos with their followers. While some people think Instagram is nothing more than “selfies”, “what I ate for lunch”, and “look at this sunset through a cool filter”, its potential business reach is substantial. Below are 10 ways that you can optimize your Instagram business account. Continue reading

Using an online marketing campaign in order to build a business is crucial these days. In fact, one would be insane to not utilize online marketing because failure would be imminent if the online space was ignored. There are several components that come together to create a successful online marketing campaign and all of them need to focus around building the brand. Continue reading

Facebook might have more users. Twitter might make more headlines. But in 2014,

Google Plus is likely to be the most important social media tool in your communications arena.

For the unfamiliar or uninitiated, here’s a Google Plus primer:

Similar to Facebook and Twitter, it allows you to create a page to promote your business, product, service or organization
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Google Plus adds significant juice to your SEO efforts.
The power of Google Plus, in terms of search engine optimization, is that every time you create a new post (or status update or tweet, in Facebook and Twitter parlance), you’re essentially creating a new web page, which is very likely to appear in Google search results.

Last year Google search hosted between 79 and 81 percent of all internet searches in the United States, according to StatCounter.

As if that’s not reason enough to make Google Plus part of your social media package in 2014, the service is also growing by leaps and bounds. It’s only been around since 2011 and already has more than 300 active users each month. It’s no longer the domain of techies and early adopters. Companies large and small are increasingly using it as a means to amplify their communications messages in the increasingly noisy world of social media.

So as you evaluate your social media strategy this year, make sure to make the most of this powerful tool.

Use the communities feature to create groups where your key audiences can connect, share ideas and talk about your business, organization, services or products. Use the hangouts feature to host discussions and demonstrations, share photos and connect directly with key audiences via video chats (which are proving much more popular than the dreadful conference calls everyone is so used to using). And consider integrating it into your homepage, landing pages and secondary pages.

It might not have the cache of Facebook or Twitter (yet), but Google Plus is emerging as a powerful new tool that shouldn’t be ignored.